Well, moving house has finally become a set of rails, the switches of which are being directed by solicitors, agents and other higher powers. As of Thursday, we have a chain: our buyer, us, our seller. That’s about as simple as it could ever get for us. Nationwide did in their usual inept manner try to complicate things, but we’re hoping to find a way of making them irrelevant somehow.

Now that we’re—as a fellow gardener put it—“going to a better place,” I’m having to resist making changes around the garden. The rose that we trained into an arc over the back gate this year: its new growth could be trained over the same arc, for flowering next year. But to what end; for us, but also for the garden? What if the buyer doesn’t want that rose there? What if they quite like it in the first year, but then when it gets unwieldy the year afterwards they feel conned somehow into a maintenance task they didn’t ask for?

A gardener’s hope is always that the garden will outlive them. And I do rather hope that the biggest structural plants at least are left alone once K. and I have moved on. But there’s no guarantee: that, after all, is what house purchase means. Nothing about our garden is all that special, except to me. Posterity will not be particularly grateful for its preservation.

All the same… I’m taking that Brachyscome with me. And the ivy-leafed pellie. And the Stipa. It’s all I can do to leave the Heucherella where it is.

2 Responses to Establishing a trope

Me and Kirsty once got pretty far advanced down the road of buying a house with lovely 30s leaded windows with coloured glass, before a builder went to the head of the queue and put a higher cash offer down. A few weeks later, the windows had all been ripped out and replaced by blank uPvC. In one way I regret not having got the seller’s details to say, however useless this might seem, that had we bought the house, we would have looked after those windows; but then in another, she sold it to someone for more money, who was clearly impatient with such details.

See, at least I’m not taking… our generic panes of double-glass…. There’s actually a form we fill in these days to prevent us doing that: or rather, to give the buyer an option if we do end up removing, say, all the light switches and fittings. I believe this used to happen generally if relationships broke down but the seller still just wanted to sell, while also punishing.

Gazumping etc. are of course still our big worries, but the lack of interest in what we’re purchasing makes us feel less like someone will swoop in and cash-offer it away. The lack of interest also worries us slightly, but then you can’t have it both ways. And we think that our seller is just a bit crap, and moved from the worst agent in the region to the second worst, so that would explain it a bit at least.

I know what you mean about wanting to contact the seller directly, but looking around our supposedly cookie-cutter 2-up/2-down with remarkable affection as I do, it will be hard enough for us to let it all go. Heaven knows how your would-be seller already felt by the point the uPVC went in.